Respawn Wields the Ban Hammer Against Apex Legends Cheaters

Respawn Entertainment and EA’s newest and hottest Battle Royale title, Apex Legends, is one of the biggest hits to have come out in the multiplayer market since the rise of Fortnite. With that sudden surge in popularity, however, the advent of cheaters is also an inevitable and unfortunate consequence. Not one to back down without a fight, Respawn has pledged to combat the unequal playing field to the best of its abilities. This past weekend, the studio’s community manager took to Reddit and outlined some key updates regarding the logistics of future plans as well as the necessary steps the developers have taken so far to fight cheaters, which included banning more than 355,000 of them.

According to the post, aside from revealing that the studio wielded the ban hammer with the help of Easy-Anti-Cheat, its specific plans going forward to prevent cheating will be kept secret to prevent any counter-measures. However, some key takeaways highlighted include bolstering the anti-cheat team, implementing a report function for crowd-sourced deterrence, and working directly “with experts, both within and outside of EA.”

Players that spam during character select and disconnect after the drop, seemingly a common problem in games so far, will also be dealt with accordingly, but as before, Respawn will keep its cards close to the chest for this one in order to avoid workarounds. However, the company promises solutions that will be implemented eventually.

The war against cheaters aside, the community manager also addressed a number of updates regarding certain fixes. The next client patch should address some of the crashes going on, but not all of these issues have been identified and fixed. A reporting option for such problems will also be added later on to assist with finding these bugs.

Respawn is also rejecting the call for a reconnect feature, as it feels that such an option would be prone to abuse, and resources could be better spent tackling stability that would make this unnecessary. Furthermore, the developers have yet to figure out why some matches observe server slowdowns at the start, so they will be looking into this problem as well.